Starring Frank Gehry

At the age of 76, Frank Gehry may be changing the rules of architecture yet again.

His Los Angeles firm, Gehry Partners, has already created the first successful model for fully integrating digital technology into architectural practice. And with his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997, he proved that progressive architecture can itself operate as a kind of urban planning -- that if a new building is enough of a draw, it can revitalize a city or region as effectively as the most comprehensive master plan.

Now comes the news that Gehry has been named lead architect on a massive project in each of America’s two largest cities: one along Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, for the developer Related Cos., and the other atop the Atlantic Rail Yards in Brooklyn, with Forest City Ratner.

The combined budget of the projects tops $5 billion. Together, they suggest that we’ve entered an era in which ambitious developers are not just open to the notion of working with architecture’s boldest talents but, in certain high-profile cases, are desperate to avoid working without them. So-called “starchitects” have become too valuable now, as urban alchemists and as marketing vehicles, for developers to ignore. This is particularly true when those developers are relying on public approval -- and public opinion -- as is the case with Grand Avenue.

The fact that Gehry seems largely to have dictated the terms of these agreements only strengthens that impression. In each case, he’s negotiated the architectural equivalent of final cut for a Hollywood director.

While some directors given carte blanche from big studios are invigorated by the responsibility, others find it overwhelming or lose their creative focus. The same is true in architecture. And Gehry has tended to do his best work when he is constrained -- by tight budgets, political squabbles or awkward sites -- and his most disappointing when he is fully autonomous. That alone is a reason for a measure of wariness about this pair of projects, in which the developers have taken pains to smooth the architect’s path.

To be sure, Gehry is a singular figure in the profession these days. It is not just the exuberant, provocative nature of his buildings that makes him attractive to Related and Forest City. It is also his successful track record when it comes to high-stakes urban designs, such as Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim, and the rigorous process his partners have developed for executing his high-flying formal language.

Fairly or unfairly, Gehry is viewed as less temperamental and more of a known quantity than any other architect who can credibly claim to be experimentally minded. It is hard to imagine an American commercial developer giving such a free hand to Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid or Thom Mayne, for example, at this stage in their respective careers.

And as the plain-speaking Gehry himself is quick to point out, he knows how to talk to developers. In large part, he landed these commissions because by all accounts the men at the helm, Related’s Stephen Ross and Bruce Ratner of Forest City, felt comfortable taking a risk with him.

Still, the sheer size and cost of the developments and the prominence of their sites mean that they will be seen as test cases for a new relationship between commercial real estate and urban design in this country. After steering clear of cutting-edge architects for decades, developers in a few cases have begun recruiting them, particularly for high-end housing. In Manhattan, architects including Richard Meier, Winka Dubbeldam and Santiago Calatrava are working on or have completed residential buildings where cutting-edge design is a central part of the marketing package. But seen in the larger context of the real estate industry, that’s been little more than a flirtation.

This is a full-on love affair.

Officials at Related admit they “begged” Gehry this summer to sign on as more than simply an advisor to the $1.8-billion Grand Avenue project, which will combine retail space and residential towers with a large new civic park. Advising had been the extent -- officially, anyway -- of his role in recent months as he worked behind the scenes to help shape a master plan produced by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and unveiled in May.

Related executives -- and local power brokers including Eli Broad, who chairs the Grand Avenue Committee overseeing the redevelopment -- knew they were lacking both an architect with wide fame and a prominent local talent for Grand Avenue. Gehry knew they knew. And that meant lots of leverage for the architect.

He ultimately worked out a deal to take on the bulk of the project’s $500-million first phase, which includes a mixture of residential and retail on a site bordered by Grand Avenue and 1st, Olive and 2nd streets. Gehry will design a 50-story hotel and condominium tower at the corner of Grand and 2nd Street, across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall. It will be his first skyscraper in Los Angeles (a residential tower in Lower Manhattan that he is building with Forest City Ratner may well be completed earlier) and by far his most sizable project in his adopted hometown.

Significantly, Gehry will produce the tower without the aid of a so-called executive architect, a larger corporate firm that is often called in to work alongside experimental or high-design architects on projects of this scale.

Gehry Partners will also handle the two- to four-story retail pavilions lining 2nd and Olive and meandering through the middle of the site toward Grand and 1st: roughly 225,000 square feet of retail space in total, set in a landscape designed by Laurie Olin. Related had originally penciled in Howard Elkus, whose Boston firm Elkus Manfredi Architects designed the suffocatingly earnest Grove open-air shopping center here, for those retail pavilions.

It remains unclear who will design the second tower in phase one, which will rise roughly 30 stories near the corner of Olive and 1st. If it is not Gehry, it is likely to be one of his former young colleagues now working independently -- say, Michael Maltzan Architecture or Daly, Genik Architects. In either case, Gehry would serve a complicated paternal role in overseeing the tower’s progress.

Gehry’s work on the $3.5-billion Brooklyn project, proposed for a six-block-long site atop the Atlantic Rail Yards and awaiting final approval, will be even more sweeping. The development, which will also proceed in phases and thus may be scaled back over time, will begin with the construction of a 19,000-seat arena for the NBA’s Nets, which now play in New Jersey, and four complementary towers. In all, Gehry could wind up designing more than a dozen buildings in the project. His firm is also entirely responsible for the master plan and for the connective tissue that will join the various towers at ground level.

Gehry, who studied planning briefly at Harvard and worked early in his career with the planner and shopping mall pioneer Victor Gruen, has occasionally, and rather hopefully, described himself an “architect/urbanist” in recent years. He sometimes complains that he’s underrated as a planner, and that the public mistakenly believes his office does little more than produce buildings that stand defiantly apart from the surrounding urban context.

In 2000, working with David Childs of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Gehry produced a fluid design for a Manhattan skyscraper to house the offices of the New York Times, a project that ultimately went to Renzo Piano. (For his part, Piano was content to collaborate on the design with a more conservative firm, in this case Fox & Fowle.) He later landed the Manhattan residential tower job with Forest City Ratner. And Gehry Partners is now at work, with the firm Cooper, Robertson Partners on a master plan for an extension of the Harvard University campus across the Charles River.

Still, Gehry has never designed anything that approaches either the Brooklyn or Grand Avenue projects in cost or complexity. To commit to both at essentially the same moment suggests that he has his eye fixed on his legacy and on ensuring a continuing flow of work and more prominent roles for some of his partners, notably Edwin Chan, Marc Salette and Craig Webb. The fees from these two jobs could keep a good-sized firm going for close to a decade.

While the firm’s participation is good news for both cities, there is surely such a thing as too much Frank Gehry. To that end, it is encouraging to learn that the architect’s recent focus on the Brooklyn project has been convincing Forest City to reduce its bulk by several hundred thousand square feet. In Los Angeles, the participation of other, younger designers -- for the park as well as the commercial parcels -- may help the project achieve something more than a vibrantly monolithic appearance.

In the end, what makes these projects exciting and precarious is that in their level of ambition, and their just-add-water approach to urbanism, they resemble nothing an American architect has ever had the chance to attempt. College campuses have occasionally been given over to a single firm, but never whole parcels of urban development at this scale, and certainly never to a figure as prominent, and as forward-looking, as Gehry. As the architect himself acknowledges, there are no models here, no precedents -- in his own career or anyone else’s.